More than ever, people of all ages, backgrounds, and traditions are becoming aware of the benefits of meditation. Broad-based yet addressing the specific needs of individuals, the completely revised and updated Meditation — The Complete Guide offers information on forty-three meditation practices. An easy-to-use self-test on personal habits and preferences directs readers to choose a practice to fit their tastes and circumstances. The authors describe all the major forms of Eastern and Western religious practice — from Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to the traditions of India, Japan, China, and Tibet. Readers can explore techniques derived from Asian and African customs or meditations simply found in life practices such as sports, gardening, and creative arts. Meditation — The Complete Guide is designed for all readers, from the beginning meditator to the healing professional, with chapters on practices to heal physically, emotionally, and mentally.

EXCERPT

Meditation means many things to many people. To some, it means simple relaxation; to others, a deep blissful surrender to the divine. To some, meditation means rigorously following a prescribed path; to others, it means exploring a path unique to the self.

Meditation can be any or all of these things, but however it is defined, it is always a practice. Whether that practice means sitting still or moving, reading inspirational words or emptying the mind of all words, meditation is something we do. This book will present you with many ways to meditate, but you will not know what works for you until you put the practices into action.

Meditation involves choice. You choose to be present — now, now, now, and now. Meditation is a practice of training your attention by focusing it on something in the present moment, such as a flower, a candle, a sound, or your own breath. Through the practice, the mind settles down.

Meditation is not a religion. It is not a doctrine or something to be acquired. Meditation is play rather than work. While you are playing, your mind is open. As long as you practice with a lightness of approach, you will experience freedom from desire and ambition.

Meditation is a path, not a goal. It is like the ringing of a bell. The afterglow of the experience is like the sound of the bell as it dies out. You need to meditate again in order to maintain and amplify the effect.

Why Practice Meditation?

Meditators have many different reasons to meditate, and the same meditator may experience different motivations at different life stages.

People often begin meditation with a specific goal in mind, such as healing a particular stress-related malady, learning to respond with appropriate spontaneity to any situation, determining when to allow emotions to flow and when to suppress them, or understanding the condition of the body. Your goals for meditation will, in all probability, change during your life. You are very likely to enlarge your goals to include such concepts as wisdom, enlightenment, grace, recovering a lost primary experience, discovering the ground of being, or aligning yourself with the forces of the universe.

There are three major ways of approaching meditation: medical, martial, and spiritual. We will deal with each of them in turn.

The medical approach to meditation includes all healing, therapy, wellness, and health-maintenance goals. Studies indicate that meditators live longer and suffer fewer degenerative diseases than people who do not have a meditation practice. Specifically, meditation has been studied as an effective way of treating high blood pressure, insomnia, and chronic pain, all of which can be treated with medication but are also likely to be relieved by meditation.

Dr. Herbert Benson, the director of the Mind/Body Institute at Harvard University, studied the physiology of meditators and found that their heart rates, breathing rates, metabolism, blood lactate levels, and blood pressure rates were lower than these measures in a “normal” (nonmeditating) population. There was also an increase in alpha waves in the brains of the meditators, and brain activity moved from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere during meditation.

When illness occurs, the healing process can be enhanced by meditation, especially in the case of physical ailments that are psychosomatic in origin (that have an emotional or a psychological cause). Stress-related diseases and disorders seem to respond to the therapeutic effect of a meditation practice.

The martial approach to meditation is geared to the enhancement of performance. This includes but is not limited to sports. Sports psychologists use imagery and relaxation techniques in training programs for all kinds of athletes, from professional to the everyday fitness walker. Other kinds of performance can benefit from meditation, too, because it enhances all types of creativity.

Musicians, actors, and dancers meditate in order to improve their skill in performance. Students use meditation techniques to improve their performance on tests and in report writing. The sensitivity that results from meditation can enhance one’s ability to parent and create loving relationships. Businesspeople, government and commercial employees, and entrepreneurs are all learning that relaxation techniques help them to make better decisions, enjoy more energy, and bring more insight to the workplace.

The third approach to meditation is spiritual. To determine what the spiritual dimension of meditation is, we need to ask what we mean by spirituality. Spirituality is aliveness, according to Joseph Campbell, the foremost interpreter of myth of our time. Spirituality may include religion but is not limited to the world’s religious traditions. The goal of meditation, like that of many spiritual traditions, is to create a balance among the mind, the heart, and the body — or between the body and the soul.

What Meditation Is Not

Meditation can most easily be defined in terms of what it is not. It is not relaxation or self-hypnosis. It is not thinking, nor is it a way of controlling our thinking. Meditation is certainly not daydreaming, nor is it a kind of drug that automatically makes us feel better. The truth is more complex than that.

Meditation is not relaxation, because it is an active rather than a passive process. Although you need to relax to practice many forms of meditation, and although meditation allows your body and mind to relax, the meditator consciously directs his or her attention to the object of meditation or to the process itself.

Similarly, meditation is clearly distinct from self-hypnosis. Self-hypnosis, like meditation, involves a period of concentrating your attention on an object. However, in self-hypnosis you enter a sort of semiconscious trance state. In meditation you remain conscious the entire time.
Although meditation seems to take place in the mind, it is not the same as thinking. Meditation attempts to transcend the kind of thinking in which you identify with your thoughts or are lost in your thoughts. The practice of meditation gives you the ability to observe your thoughts, just as you can observe all other experiences. Without the awareness developed in meditation, the subject of your thoughts usually dominates your attention and distracts you from the condition of your moment-to-moment mental state.

Through meditation you become detached from your thoughts and emotions, and you develop the skill of allowing your thoughts to subside at will. This process is extremely restorative after a normal day of activity.

Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com